Final Week: Wolfgang Laib
Without Place–Without Time–Without Body
Wolfgang Laib. Installation view of Without Place–Without Time–Without Body. Exhibited at Sean Kelly Gallery, Sept. 7–Oct. 13, 2007
German Wolfgang Laib’s exhibit Without Place—Without Time—Without Body will be closing Sunday, January 17, 2010, at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Originally created in New York at Sean Kelly Gallery in 2007, the sculpture was recreated on a larger scale at the Nelson-Atkins by Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art Leesa Fanning and Director of Sean Kelly Gallery Maureen Bray, who created the installation with Laib in New York.
Over a period of almost four days, Fanning, Bray, and others built the installation using hazelnut pollen and over 450 pounds of white basmati rice. This conceptual installation of five mounds of vibrant golden pollen laid out in the center of a grid with 4315 conical rice heaps is a simple and stunning exemplar of the transcending sculptures for which Laib is known.
The Without Place—Without Time—Without Body installation grew out of Laib’s previous work. In 1983, Laib went to China and climbed the Five Great Mountains to their various heights. These mountains in both Taoism and Buddhism practice are considered sacred and important destinations for pilgrimage. In 1984, the manifested inspiration became the piece The Five Mountains Not to Climb On (Die fünf unbesteigbaren Berge). For this piece, Laib hand-collected hazelnut pollen for weeks in Southern Germany, using his fingers to brush the pollen into a jar. Once the pollen was collected, it was laid out in row of five luminous mounds, each approximately 3 inches high, directly on the gallery floor.
Laib explains in an interview with Fanning, “Over the years to come, I realized how important, how central this work [The Five Mountains Not to Climb On] became, for my other artworks and for my life. I showed it the first time with Harald Szeemann, in 1985—our first exhibition together Weak as the Monument, Strong as the Echo—which was the beginning of a long friendship. This was the starting point, and it contained all the visions and dreams about art, about life, about what is important. And only 20 years later, like four years ago, I began to enlarge this work with hundreds of rice mountains.”
Laib’s world travels and split residency between Germany and Tamil Nadu influences and illuminates the use of all natural materials in his works. India’s ritualistic practices using rice, flowers, milk, and the abundant materials of stone, marble, and rich pollen in his native land have direct and indirect references and uses. Without Place—Without Time—Without Body uses hazelnut pollen and rice exclusively.
To Fanning, it is important to note both the universal significance of pollen as a regenerative and seasonal substance and its placement in the center of the sculpture. She says, “I like to think of T. S. Eliot’s ‘still point at the center of the world.’ This point or center is in Tibetan mandalas or cosmic diagrams and represents the center of the universe. If you study Buddhism there is the idea of the immovable spot where Buddha sat at the foot of the bodhi tree and obtained enlightenment. The immovable spot can also be thought of as the state of mind where one is calm and can commune with the absolute, a meditative counterpoint to the harsh realties of life as it is so still and so quiet.”
In Fanning’s interview, Laib adds, “These small mountains of pollen contained the whole cosmos—the beginning of life and everything."
With the use of rice, Fanning emphasizes that it is both seed and sustenance: a humble, life-sustaining food for over half the world’s population with significant cultural, historic, and religious uses and symbolism. Laib explains his extensive use of the material, “I’ve used rice as a symbol of food, but then not only food for the physical body, but also food for another world.”
With these natural materials, Laib tends to use simple archetypal forms in his sculptures—eggs, mounds, ziggurats. These forms are reductive but have abstract connotations throughout cultures and across time. The egg is symbolic of creation, the mound representative of the mountain or the Egyptian pyramids’ primordial origins, the ziggurats suggestive of the ascension of the Tower of Babel.
The mound forms used for the entire Without Place—Without Time—Without Body sculpture were created by hand with a dedicated, ritualistic, meditative process. Starting with the pollen, Fanning says, “You can see him out in the fields near his studio—he lives and works very much in seclusion—collecting pollen speck-by-speck-by-speck. I asked him about the process of collecting pollen—what it was like—Laib said, ‘Well, it’s very much, for me, an experience of time and a different kind of time; it slows time down. It is not a clock time or a rational time. It’s this experience of expansion or slowing down something in our culture that we are not always familiar with or comfortable with, either.’”
The pollen mounds are created carefully and slowly as pollen will collapse upon itself after a certain height. Fanning says, “The docents and museum guides felt it was an interesting ‘ah ha’ moment when we recognized that the point at which it collapse is called the ‘angle of repose.’ How beautiful and poetic is that?”
The process of laying out mounds of rice in a grid was done handful-by-handful. There were no funnels or measuring cups involved, only practiced, deliberate gestures in which those helping learned to let the rice flow from their hands, a practice that did not come naturally and created irregularities. If the mound failed to form, the creator had to start over. Fanning explains that the resulting irregularities and grains of scattered rice are intentional and that Laib deeply appreciates the irregularities created as evidence of the human gesture in creation.
Fanning also explains the importance of repetition in this work, “Repetition, for Laib, is the most perfect thing that exists. His idea of repetition has nothing to do with minimalism. Although we might associate his work with minimalism because of the idea of a grid or repetition, it has nothing to do with this idea of mathematical proportions at all.
“This is completely different. His idea of repetition has to do with the Hindu and Buddhist idea called the ‘eternal recurrence of the same.’ This refers to the idea of cycles, time, destruction/creation, and the idea of infinity and boundlessness.
“The mounds of rice suggest expansion and potential into infinity. This has much more in common with Navajo sand painting that is done on the floor and with Tibetan sand mandalas—cosmic diagrams—because they have the idea of sacred and spiritual content. They are meditative, ritualistic, and ephemeral.”
The result is what Fanning calls “a mythical mountainous landscape of infinite proportions.” Laib adds, “I always saw it as a detail of an infinite ocean—a detail not only in place, but also in time and physically.”
After January 17, 2010, Bray will come back to Kansas City for the deconstruction of Without Place—Without Time—Without Body. She will carefully collect the hazelnut pollen, considered a piece of art itself, and the rice will be respectfully gathered and composted.
To read more of Fanning’s interview with Laib, please click here.
Through January 17, 2010
Without Place—Without Time—Without Body
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
4535 Oak Street
Kansas City, Missouri
www.nelson-atkins.org
Admission to museum and exhibit are free.
Video by Vernissage TV: German artist Wolfgang Laib's exhibition Without Time - Without Body - Without Place at Sean Kelly Gallery, New York. The show was organized around one of Laib's most important new, large-scale pollen and rice installations. On display are also a monumental double staircase, new black and red houses of Indian granite, and wax sculptures. September 6, 2007.
"Arts" is proudly sponsored by the Actor Training Studio.
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